An evil stepmother demands a beautiful maiden's lungs and liver.
A girl is ripped from a wolf's stomach, and sisters mutilate their feet to squeeze into a solid gold slipper.
During the early 1800s, brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gathered these unflinchingly gory details from stories circulating around what's now Germany.
But as the tales amassed widespread fame, they morphed dramatically.
The Brothers Grimm were born in Hanau in the 1780s.
At the time, Germanic lands didn't yet exist as the unified nation-state of Germany, but were instead divided into small independent princedoms.
And French forces exerted significant control over the region as a result of Napoleon's expansionist aims.
Meanwhile, European Romanticism was beginning to flourish, accompanied by movements to preserve national languages and traditions.
In their teens, the Brothers Grimm enrolled to study law at university and soon became interested in how local rules and customs were embedded in folk stories.
It wasn't long before they began undertaking their own romantic nationalist project, soliciting all manner of German folklore, striving, they said, "To penetrate into the wild forests of their ancestors." Their aim was to foster a unifying sense of German cultural identity.
